(Credits: Ирина Лепнёва)
Wed 31 December 2025 20:00, UK
When talking about the most debaucherous rock and roll stars of all time, there’s a reason why Tom Petty is never on that list.
He didn’t get into the business to chase women and drink as much as he possibly could, and listening to his music, he was content chasing after wherever his muse decided to take him. But he liked to have a good time, and after years at the top of the rock and roll, he realised pretty quickly that there comes a point where the party has to end before someone gets hurt.
But even when the band was riding high, Petty was usually more reserved than the rest of them. He let the rest of the Heartbreakers get up to whatever they wanted to behind the scenes, and as long as they would be able to show up for rehearsal and get everything right when they played a concert, that was enough for him. But it’s not like the rise was exactly glamorous for them half the time.
It took forever for him to even muster the strength to make Damn the Torpedoes, and once the band were launched into stardom, it’s not like their subsequent records were exactly happy. Hard Promises boasts a lot of good songs, but you can hear the pain in his voice after losing his mother, and even Long After Dark has those occasional moments where he seems to be spinning his wheels a little too much.
All he really needed was a chance to switch things up, but getting everybody blitzed out of their minds on cocaine wasn’t exactly going to help. They had spent time away from the road trying to work on the record Southern Accents, but the more time it took for them to paint a picture of the American South, the more that Petty started to see his muse start to slip away whenever trying to nail down tunes like ‘Rebels’.
It was bad enough that Petty broke his hand trying to get everything sounding right, but even when it was released, the record looked a lot different than what he planned for. He wanted a massive double record all about the places he once knew, and while there’s a lot of that still there on the title track and ‘Dogs on the Run’, there’s also tunes like ‘Make It Better’ and ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ that feel like they’ve been plucked from some experimental record he may have worked on at the same time.
Petty was still proud of what he made, but if he wanted to keep the band going, there was no way that it could have been this crazy in the studio ever again, saying, “We were right off the tracks then, all of us. I remember hiring all those people and not even rehearsing them — you know, ‘Just play along.’ Southern Accents in general was a wilder kind of wild because we were wealthier and more powerful than we had been when we were doing ‘Breakdown.’ Everyone had their own set of problems.”
Even if the band still sounded great, the after-effects of the record wouldn’t really be felt until the next time around. Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough) is still a fine album, but after spending so much time together, Petty needed to take a break, which probably explains why he felt happier playing with the Traveling Wilburys around that time and working on his various solo albums.
So, really, Southern Accents feels like a fork in the road for Petty’s career in many respects. The band were still in fine form and they could make classics when they wanted to, but after years of spinning their wheels, things needed to change before they found themselves heading towards a brick wall.
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